Critical Discourse Analysis as a Research Tool

1 Critical Discourse Analysis as a Research Tool Hilary Janks University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) stems from a Critical theory of language which sees the use of language as a form of social practice. All social practice are tied to specific historical contexts and are the means by which existing social relations are reproduced or contested and different interests are served. It is the questions pertaining to interests - How is the text positioned or positioning? Whose interests are served by this positioning?

2 Whose interests are negated? What are the consequences of this positioning? - that relate Discourse to relations of power . Where Analysis seeks to understand how Discourse is implicated in relations of power , it is called Critical Discourse Analysis . Fairclough's (1989, 1995) model for CDA consists three inter-related processes of Analysis tied to three inter-related dimensions of Discourse . These three dimensions are 1 The object of Analysis (including verbal, visual or verbal and visual texts). 2 The processes by means of which the object is produced and received (writing/.)

3 Speaking/designing and reading/listening/viewing) by human subjects. 3 The socio-historical conditions which govern these processes. According to Fairclough each of these dimensions requires a different kind of Analysis 1 text Analysis (description), 2 processing Analysis (interpretation), 3 social Analysis (explanation). What is useful about this approach is that it enables you to focus on the signifiers that make up the text, the specific linguistic selections, their juxtapositioning, their sequencing, their layout and so on.

4 However, it also requires you to recognise that the historical determination of these selections and to understand that these choices are tied to the conditions of possibility of that utterance. This is another way of saying that texts are instanciations of socially regulated discourses and that the processes of production and reception are socially constrained. Why Fairclough's approach to CDA is so useful is because it provides multiple points of analytic entry. It does not matter which kind of Analysis one begins with, as long as in the end they are all included and are shown to be mutually explanatory.

5 It is in the interconnections that the analyst finds the interesting patterns and disjunctions that need to be described, interpreted and explained. In this paper I will demonstrate how to use this three-part analytic model for working with a text. However, one of the weaknesses of verbal accounts is that words cannot be presented as a gestalt: words march in rows one after the other, structured into a meaningful order. Analysis is not always as tidily linear. Fairclough tries to capture the simultaneity of his method of CDA with a model that embeds the three different kinds of Analysis one inside the other.

6 See Figure 1 (Fairclough, 1995: 98). Include Fairclough model here: Figure 1. The embedding of the boxes emphasises the interdependence of these dimensions and the intricate moving backwards and forwards between the different types of Analysis which this interdependence necessitates. It is easier to capture the inter-dependence of Fairclough's boxes if one thinks of them three dimensionally as boxes nesting one inside the other rather than as concentric circles. This three dimensional image enables one to understand that an analytic move to examine a single box necessarily breaks the interdependence between the boxes and requires subsequent moves which re-insert that box into its interconnected place.

7 The focus on any one box therefore has to be seen as a relatively arbitrary place from which to begin. A technique that I use, in the initial stages of working with a text, is to draw three large, empty embedded boxes. I record my analytic comments in the appropriate box as they occur. This enables me to work with the different types of Analysis simultaneously, rather than sequentially. This also facilitates the drawing of linking lines across the boxes to stress inter-connections. Engaged and estranged reading positions: reading with and against a text Looking at a text critically is not very difficult when we disagree with it - when the positions that it offers to us as readers are far removed from what we think and believe and value.

8 In cases where we begin from a position of estrangement or alienation from the text it is easier to read against rather than with the text. In such a case the interests served by the text may be apparent; the reader may even be at the receiving end of the consequences entailed and might have little difficulty in questioning the text. Where the naturalisations in a text are not natural for us as readers or listeners, we are at an advantage in that this teaches us that what texts construct are only versions of reality. In South Africa large scale shack settlements which had existed in the same place for at least a generation were referred to by the apartheid State as squatter camps'; whereas the Bantustans which urban dwellers may not even have visited were designated as homelands' to which they could be repatriated'.

9 People did not need degrees in CDA to know where home is. Their lived experience de-constructed the language of apartheid. Readers who do not share the codes of the text are an important CDA resource in teaching and in Research . These readers, for whom dominant discourses are not naturalised, usually because of their marginalised position in the society, can assist those readers who do share the text's codes to read against the grain. Often these readers are the very people who are labelled as disadvantaged or lacking the cultural capital for dominant literacy, that is for producing dominant readings of a text from the position of the ideal reader.

10 This labelling implies an assimilationist model of literacy, where readers are expected to identify with the textual positionings, rather than a Critical model, which requires them to both engage with and question these positions. A range of factors both textual and non-textual, structure the reader's engaged-estranged location in relation to any particular text. Each on its own is a form of entrapment. Engagement without estrangement is a form of submission to the power of the text regardless of the reader's own positions. Estrangement without engagement is a refusal to leave the confines of one's own subjectivity, a refusal to allow otherness to enter.